‘Greville Fane’: Portrait of a ‘Lady-Novelist’

Abstract

In 1892 James wrote ‘Greville Fane’, the third story in his series on the literary life. It is as different in form and substance from its predecessors, ‘The Author of Beltraffio’ and ‘The Lesson of the Master’, as they are from each other. It is the most extensive of James’s comic portraits of ‘lady novelists’, preceding such satirically drawn characters as Guy Walsingham (who also takes a masculine pen name) in ‘The Death of the Lion’; Jane Highmore in ‘The Next Time’; and Gwendolyn Erme in ‘The Figure in the Carpet’. ‘Greville Fane’ also precedes James’s developing by the end of the 1890s a more sympathetic view of women as novelists and of their likely contributions to the art of fiction.1 It is unique among James’s fictions about writers in that it is not a conventionally conceived dramatic fiction, but rather, as James called it, an ‘anecdote’, a ‘minor miracle of foreshortening’ (Volume XVI, p. vii). Moreover, despite its comic perspective, it is the first fiction through which James dramatises his ever-clearer belief about the responsibility of the critic to respond with flexibility and humanity to his subject. His narrator in ‘Greville Fane’ is an illustration of the critic James had described in his essay ‘Criticism’ in the preceding year:

Keywords

Assure Resi Tray Stake Prose

The critic… deals with life at second-hand as well as at first; that is, he deals with the experience of others, which he resolves into his own, and not of those invented and selected others with whom the novelist makes comfortable terms, but with the uncompromising swarm of authors, the clamorous children of history. He has to make them as vivid and as free as the novelist makes his puppets, and yet he has… to take them as they come. (Coll. in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature p. 99)2

Notes and Reference

Edel (ed.), The Complete Tales of Henry James. For this edition Edel uses the text which first appeared in book form in The Real Thing (New York, 1893). It was little changed in this version from its original appearance in the Illustrated London News, September 1892.Google Scholar